Borrowed Time

The Network Time Protocol keeps Charly up to date at all times. To put all of this punctuality in the service of the common good, he even exports the time signal.

If the clock on my personal laptop is a few seconds fast or slow, this is not dramatic. On a server, however, it's different. Logfiles should – at least – be synchronized to the exact second; otherwise, troubleshooting becomes a pain. The software that handles this synchronization is, of course, the NTP daemon (ntpd) [1]. As a special hardware time source, you could use a suitable DCF 77 or GPS receiver, for example. If you don't have one of those, you could ask some other time servers – you need to poll several to compute the time from the running time differences of the UDP packets on the network.

The NTP configuration in the /etc/ntp.conf file on my Ubuntu lab machine lists five time servers:

The iburst ("initial burst") keyword speeds up synchronization on the first connection. A list of public time servers is available online [2].

Borrowed Time

Just to check, I entered ntpq-p at the command line; this returned a list of all the time servers that my daemon contacted (Figure 1). The first column shows how reliable the time sources are: An asterisk (*) denotes the current reference server. A plus sign means that the time from this server is used to compute the mean value. Servers with a minus sign have recently supplied times with too large of a deviation – if this problem were to exist permanently, I would need to delete them from the configuration.

Figure 1: Ntpd provides information on time servers, which it uses as references for its computations.

Sharing Free Time

Furthermore, nothing prevents me from providing my time server to others. The expected traffic is minimal, and the safety risks are also minimal if this setup is configured correctly. Specifically, in /etc/ntp.conf, I need to stipulate that external NTP clients can retrieve time information but not configure anything. The following lines do the trick:

How do other users learn about my time server? The best way is to add it to a popular time network like pool.ntp.org[3]. A working ntpd is the only prerequisite for time servers; you can complete a web form for the actual entries. The more people to join, the less the load per server, and most importantly: We all have more free time (Figure 2).

Charly Kühnast is a Unix operating system administrator at the Data Center in Moers, Germany. His tasks include firewall and DMZ security and availability. He divides his leisure time into hot, wet, and eastern sectors, where he enjoys cooking, freshwater aquariums, and learning Japanese.

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